Sam Whiting

Updated 1:31 am, Sunday, November 17, 2013

Jeffrey Earl Warren, grandson of the late U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren whose commission investigated the Kennedy assassination, stands in the backyard of his home in St. Helena.
Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle

Jeffrey Earl Warren, grandson of the late U.S. Chief Justice Earl...

A photo of Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, right and his grandson Jeffrey Earl Warren as they attend a Washington Senators baseball game in 1962, is seen in the home of Jeffery Warren in St. Helena, CA Tuesday, November 12, 2013.

Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle

A photo of Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, right and his...

Jeffrey Earl Warren, grandson of Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, poses for a portrait in the study of his home in St. Helena, CA Tuesday, November 12, 2013.
Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle

A letter from Jacqueline Kennedy to Jeffrey Earl Warren, grandson of Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren following President Kennedy's assassination , is seen in his home in St. Helena, CA Tuesday, November 12, 2013.
Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle

A letter from Jacqueline Kennedy to Jeffrey Earl Warren, grandson...

Jeffery Earl Warren's St. Helena High School letter sweater he was given in a ceremony on Nov. 22, 1963, the day of the Kennedy assassination, at his home in St. Helena, CA Tuesday, November 12, 2013.
Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle

It's a job that has been nearly full-time of late because the name he is in charge of protecting is that of his late grandfather, Earl Warren, governor of California, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and the man who headed the Warren Commission, the government's investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.

During this 50th anniversary of the assassination, the air is crackling with conspiracy and second-shooter theorists out to impugn the name attached to the official investigation. Feature films and documentaries, books and articles, lectures and symposia are out to prove that Chief Justice Warren had reason to either cover up the truth or stop his investigation short of finding it. As one conspiracy theorist stated a minute into a recently broadcast TV documentary, "The American people know the Warren Report was garbage."

This irks Jeff Warren, who as a teenager witnessed firsthand the friendship between Kennedy and the chief justice, and witnessed it secondhand in a letter from Jacqueline Kennedy to Earl Warren, sent a month after the crime.

"He and Kennedy really liked each other," Warren says, while engaging in his other morning ritual of stacking wood for his next fire. "Papa Warren's own father was murdered in Bakersfield and the killer never found. He knew the pain of an unsolved murder. So Papa Warren was not going to not find the killer of his friend."

Family Ambassador

Among 16 grandchildren, Warren, 65, has accepted the role of Warren Family Ambassador. Anywhere and anytime he will rise to the defense of "Papa Warren," as he calls him still, nearly 40 years after his death. He has been in documentaries, on TV and radio, and written columns and editorials. Just last weekend, he missed his first Cal-USC game in 50 years or more, in order to speak at a symposium in San Francisco. On Wednesday, he spoke about the assassination at Pacific Union College in Angwin.

"I use my full name, Jeffrey Earl Warren, and people think I'm milking it,' he says. "But I do it because I want people to think of him." Then he ticks off a list of landmark civil rights decisions by the Warren Court.

"He changed America," Warren says, momentarily stopping his stacking to make a point. "He wrote the words, 'Separate but equal is inherently unequal.' "

But that his grandfather wrote those words in the historic Supreme Court case that ended school segregation is not what people want to hear from him. They want to hear who killed Kennedy. He's been asked that so many times that he's developed a stock answer.

"Well, they asked me not to tell," he will say, looking over his shoulder for an imaginary FBI agent, "but I guess I can tell you."

Recalls where he was

Like everybody else of his generation, Warren remembers where he was on that distant November Friday. He was onstage for an assembly at St. Helena High School, getting ready to receive his block letter "S" for varsity football.

The P.E. teacher dashed in with the announcement, but the football coach, George Davis, was undeterred. It was the end of an undefeated season for the St. Helena Saints.

"The president would have wanted us to go on with the award ceremony," he recalls coach Davis saying. The letter ceremony continued to completion. Warren has a picture of it in a scrapbook with the caption "November 22, 1963." Back then, he kept quiet about his connections and did not brag that he'd met the president in Washington, D.C., where he was summering with his grandparents. A picture that ran in The Chronicle Sporting Green shows Kennedy at District of Columbia Stadium (later renamed RFK Memorial) looking up at a pop fly and six seats away is a kid in a flattop. This is Jeff Warren.

He was only 14, but he went right up to Kennedy before the game and said, "Excuse me Mr. President, but my grandfather works for you. I'm Jeffrey Earl Warren."

"Your grandfather doesn't work for me," the president responded. "He works for the American people."

On the night before Kennedy left for Texas, he had hosted a dinner in honor of the chief justice. Two days later the president was dead, and Warren was making the long walk in the dark, from the high school to his father's real estate office at the north end of Main Street, to wait for a ride home to the Lazy J Ranch where they lived, a mile up a winding dirt road into the hills above town.

Warren got in front of the TV set and was still in front of it when his grandfather came on to speak to the nation while standing before the president's coffin in the Rotunda of the Capitol.

One month later, the chief justice came to St. Helena for Christmas at the Lazy J Ranch. President Lyndon B. Johnson had already appointed him chairman of the Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, but Jeff Warren, then 15, recalls only that his grandfather was tailed by two Secret Service agents, who stayed in the guest house.

"He didn't trust the Secret Service. He figured that's the way you get killed, but they forced it on him."

When the Warren Commission released its report on Sept. 24, 1964, it ran 18,000 pages in 27 volumes, and the full set was mailed to the Lazy J Ranch. Warren never asked the chief justice about it, but his mother, Margaret Jessie Warren, did.

"She was sort of mouthy like me," he says, "and one time she said, 'Well, did Lee Harvey Oswald really do it?' " He said (Warren drops his voice to imitate the gravitas of the chief justice): "I can assure you, Maggie, Lee Harvey Oswald did it, but unless you are going to read all 27 volumes I'm not going to talk to you about it."

Earl Warren retired in 1969 and in 1970 his grandson graduated from UC Berkeley, an English major en route to New York to become an advertising copywriter.

"It was like 'Mad Men,' " he says, "but there was a lot more sex, drinking and smoking than in the TV series."

Straight off they started arguing politics, Warren having been influenced by the prison memoir "Soul on Ice" while at Berkeley. "I was still in my left-of-Eldridge-Cleaver mode and she was a Republican," he says. "So we had this big argument about Barry Goldwater."

Moves to Bay Area

So big that it flowed out the door of McMullen's and down to Studio 54. Within a year of their first date they were married at St. Patrick's Cathedral, with Liz Smith reporting on the event for the New York Daily News. They lived on the Upper East Side until 1983 when their first child was born. Their move to the Oakland hills was heralded by Herb Caen when Warren and daughter Casey, 6 months, won the "Stroller Division" in the 1984 Bay to Breakers. Casey Warren, a baby model, retired from the profession along with her mom when her brother Jeffrey Earl Warren Jr. was born in 1985.

They moved to St. Helena 25 years ago, when Warren was offered a job with his dad in what became James Warren & Son Inc., a realty firm with a cowboy hat for a logo and an 1884 farmhouse for an office.

Warren had been a creative director for the Ford account at J. Walter Thompson and now he was driving one as a "dirt salesman," while moonlighting as the P.A. announcer for the high school football games. Cindy, the cover girl, worked the snack bar. They were raising three kids and joining every civic and school committee in town when he was given the additional job as protector of the Warren name.

His father, "Jim Pop," must have known something bad was coming, and it was. Just months after Jim Pop died, out came the Oliver Stone biopic "JFK," which posited the theory of the second shooter on the grassy knoll, as if it were cold, hard truth.

The year, 1991, was the centennial of Earl Warren's birth and now he was being laid low by the most talked-about film of the year.

Warren won't claim to have overdone it in defense of Earl Warren, but he did drive up to the Lazy J Ranch to conduct his own ballistics test, dragging along winemaker Marc Mondavi. With a bolt-action rifle, Warren paced off the distance of the lethal bullet from the Texas School Book Depository, 175 feet.

Then he fired into a melon wrapped in tape and placed on a bench. The impact caused the melon to bounce back toward him, just like the president's head. This confirmed in his mind the single-shooter theory and allayed the notion that Kennedy must have been shot from the front by a second gunman, causing his head to snap back.p

Warren and his older brother James, a retired San Francisco Superior Court judge, now co-own the Lazy J and have left it essentially as it was the last time the chief justice came up for Christmas, shortly before his death in 1974. They put a lock on the gate and there she sits, all 27 volumes of the Warren report on the shelf in the library.

Warren has his own library at home in town, but the most valuable artifacts are in an envelope marked "personal property," kept in the attic. Among its contents are two letters from Kennedy's widow, one typed, one hand-written. The first is dated Dec. 20, 1963, and when he reads from it his voice is almost Kennedy-esque.

Letter from Jackie

"Dear Mr. Chief Justice:

"You were more than kind to write me in your own hand. All the brave things you said about John, I know they are true. I keep trying to remember what you said to me about him the night I sat next to you at dinner at the Peruvian Embassy. I told him on the way home and he was so touched and pleased because he always loved you so much.

"He admired you inordinately long before he was President and you always sustained him. I remember him saying one night when he was quite upset about what was happening in Congress, 'but the Republicans, how can you hope for anything from them. They nominated Dewey and Nixon when they could have had Earl Warren.

"These are probably things I should be keeping to myself now but wanted to let you know that he admired you as much as you admired him. Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice for all that you've done and for the beautiful way you spoke of Jack at the Capitol.

"I send you a card of him. It is a picture of him that I loved, not the one they had at the funeral.